Hallelujah, a working disk-span function (WinRAR)

Member Name: ironfrost

Product:	WinRAR
Date:	27/08/02 (288 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Working disk-span function, Compresses files slightly smaller than WinZip

Disadvantages: Less people have support for RAR files

As those who know me know, I'm fond of downloading large files from the internet. Unfortunately, my own computer isn't online, due to problems with my university's phone network (it's not a BT line so the unlimited time packages aren't available). This naturally leads to problems.

Fortunately the university computers have blisteringly fast download rates, so I can download files on these computers and transfer them over to my home machine. For this, I have to use the humble floppy disk - which has a capacity far less than many of the files I download.

As such, I need a program capable of splitting a file over a number of disks. My first port of call was WinZip - the popular compression utility that also has the capability of multiple disk spanning. However, in this I was let down by one of the fundamental problems of the 3.5" disk - they are liable to corrupt and lose all the data on them. With WinZip, this means having to re-copy the data to all of the disks in the archive (in this case, it was 16). Which is why I now use WinRar.

WinRar has a far better method of disk spanning, in that you can specify the maximum size of the file within the program, and when you compress your file it will split into a number of archives of this size. This not only makes creating a spanned archive easier (just split up the file and copy each file to a different disk), it also means that, should one of your disks fail, you've only lost the data on that disk - I just go back to university and copy the relevant file, rather than having to re-compress the entire download. As when the data is compressed it is written to the hard drive and then transferred, instead of directly making the file on the floppy, it is also faster.

The compression ratio of .rar files is typically noticeably better than that of zip archives as well, especially with text-based files, which are on average about 20% smaller. And in addition to handlin
g its own .rar files, winrar can also open compressed files of virtually any type, including the more common .zip format (which it can also make) as well as reading those pesky .gz and .arj files that winzip can't extract. And it has full support for self extractors too.

As far as ease of use goes, it's pretty similar to WinZip - it integrates into the shell, so to extract something you just have to right-click on the file and say extract; you archive files in the same unless you're wanting to do something complicated, such as splitting the file. Even this is very easy - you simply open the program and say "add files to archive".

No program is perfect however, and that applies to WinRar as well - the .rar files it makes can't be opened by people without the WinRar software, which isn't as popular as zip managers. Another gripe is that the latest version of the software (version 3) uses a different system to split files than the previous models, so a split file from version 3 can't be opened unless you have version 2.9 or higher. The download of the latest version is under a megabyte though, so it's not too big a problem.

A 40 day free trial of WinRar is available in 10 different languages from www.rarlab.com; after that 40 days the program still works without any problems, although there is a nag screen that asks you to pay for the software. At $29, it's probably worth it.

Summary: